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The Song I Will Be Buried To

Writer's picture: youngtobaccoyoungtobacco

10:00AM


Nicked my finger real good cutting some carrots for my weekly soup lunch prep. This little fucker will not die.


It knits itself up just enough to come undone when I button my pants or zip my jackets. Until a little trickle of blood oozes all over my keyboard when I try to type things.


(God damn it.)


Worked on new Fixation Arc material this weekend. Finished up some lyrics and mixes, both of which are, shall I say, of the times. A rage against the machine reshaping our brains and reshaping the definition of a country I used to recognize.


I've been watching a documentary series about how the movies of my past were made. Last night it was Forrest Gump, and it struck me how different Robert Zemeckis' America is now than the one he tried to highlight across Forrest's cross-country run.


I wonder if it's still there. Or if I am, in fact, stateless.


Of course, even that America had its whitewashing. Built on stolen land, stolen ideas, stolen labor. No amount of Tom Hanks' golly affectations could erase it.


But even then, there was at least a vision. A set of values we at least aspired to, even if we continued to fail miserably.


Now, there is a great turning. Like schools of fish.


"She is merely acclimatizing herself, in accordance with a natural law, like an animal which changes its coat for the winter. Thousands of people like [Frl. Schroeder] are acclimatizing themselves. After all, whatever government is in power, they are doomed to live in this town."


-Christopher Isherwood in Berlin, 1933


I want to go back in time to the immediate post-MySpace days and tell the strapping young Zucks that, in their noble quest to connect the planet, they were about to pull up a rock that had placed there for good reason. That to accelerate the good ideas would also make the bad ideas do the same, and often faster.


Last night I watched Saltburn, a film about a pathologically lying sociopath who ingratiates himself into a wealthy but flawed family, only to infiltrate so deeply into their lives that they couldn't get rid of him.


But maybe I got the bad guy wrong. One person's sociopath is another's Robin Hood.


Perhaps I'm living too much inside my head and need to get out more.


But...


The fog of culture war.


Whispers of government comms only being broadcast on X, the plaything of one man. A burgeoning trillionaire's "public square." Whispers of the pillars of our admittedly imperfect safety net in the process of being gutted.


At this point in tech, it's not a stretch to see buying and selling eventually restricted to digital currency and integrated bio-metrics. My MacBook knows my thumbprint and my phone knows my face.


It all seems, I don't know, Biblical somehow. If you believe in that sort of thing.

Perhaps I'm living too much inside my head and need to get out more.


Hard week, watching it all roll out. Working as if everything is ok when it actually might not be. Working through the ick of submission - a latecomer to my manuscript submission blitz finally came through with another polite rejection.


Thank you for your time.


I sit at the brewery next door between vocal takes and editing, watching bands perform sets on YouTube. Members as young as (or younger than) my son.


There was a time when I was quite the online troll, at least when it came to music. I envision one of these bands with my son as a member and imagine someone like my old self eviscerating them on a public forum. It makes my heart hurt.


I will never make fun of a young band again.


Creating is hard because to do it effectively you have to let yourself sink into places of the soul that aren’t fun for anyone - the depression, the rage, the darkness. (But thanks to Suno, it doesn't have to be hard and any soulless grifter can do it.)

Regardless, a hard week.


Old songs I haven't heard surface through the algorithm assigned to me and make me re-feel the emotional contours of lonely nights from years ago. The darkness of post-divorce Pizza King with a bottle of Gato Negro from Meijer and films like The Fountain.


I decided Together We Will Live Forever will be the song I will be buried to.



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What I’m reading: The Death of Expertise (Tom Nichols)

What I'm listening to: The Fountain OST (Clint Mansell)

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